Tag Archives | hidden mysteries

The official demise of Arthur Magazine, Jay Babcock’s carefully cultivated psychedelic culture journal, left many fretting their future prospects for an intriguing, in depth, and off-color window into the fractuous mindstream of contemporary culture. Thankfully the digital beast we ride would never allow such a thing, and Arthur Mag lives on through online archives, and a new Tumblr feed, which is already bearing fruit as evinced by the news of the upcoming publication of Anthony Alvarado’s initiatic indulgence D.I.Y. Magic, a book born from a series of articles that ran in Arthur Magazine:

“What is magic? It is the fine and subtle art of driving yourself insane! No really, it is just that. It is a con game you play on your own brain. It is the trick of letting yourself go crazy, and when it’s done right, the magus treads the same sacred and profane ground where walks the madman…

We can read descriptions of myths, of the practices of shamans, but the descriptions we might read by a Pentecostal believer, or a voodoo practitioner ridden by the loa, will be meaningless to us unless we have already been in the state they describe.… Read the rest